Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it's too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the "passing along" of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York's reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. But before Microsoft's Bing started cranking out creepy love letters; before Meta's Galactica spewed racist rants; before ChatGPT began writing such perfectly decent college essays that some professors said, "Screw it, I'll just stop grading"; and before tech reporters sprinted to claw back claims that AI was the future of search, maybe the future of everything else, too, Emily M. Bender co-wrote the octopus paper. Bender is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. She published the paper in 2020 with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller. The goal was to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs -- the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT -- can and cannot do. Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have ...